Read my face!

One look says it all: How expressions speak volumes

Gaye Davies of Lincoln Park can read her husband's look of love with a single glance.

She describes it as his "cheesy, over-the-top, sappy, doe-eyed look, with a slight head tilt."

Sounds like a look perfected at Humane Societies across the country.

"He's saying I started it, but then [he] picked it up," Davies said. "Now when one does it, the other does it back. It's become the universal sign for 'I love you.'

"It's completely silly, but it makes us laugh."

It's no surprise that non-verbal communication is heavily responsible for conveying our thoughts and emotions.

Just think of your favorite reality show and how you instinctively scan faces for signs of what the participants are really thinking. We note glares, wide-eyed fear, phony smiles and other facial and eye movements that give us an inkling of what the show's outcome might be.

But just how much information non-verbal communication conveys might be surprising.

In intimate relationships, what we show on our face--and how our partners read it--can bring couples closer or push them apart.

"Facial expressions play an enormous role in understanding, tracking and responding to the feelings of those we care most about," said Paul Ekman, author of "Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communications and Emotional Life" (Henry Holt and Co., $25).

What happens on the face depends on whether the relationship is functional or dysfunctional, Ekman said. "In dysfunctional relationships, it's not that expressions play no role, but there's a different array."

According to research by a psychologist and mathematicians at the University of Washington who developed a mathematical model for predicting divorce, one of the best predictors of marital dissolution was a look of contempt on the face of one partner while the couples were discussing difficult issues.

The research was done between 1988 and '92, with follow-up between 1992 and '96.

Researchers videotaped couples for 15 minutes while they discussed areas of conflict, such as sex or money, and assigned points to their behaviors during the interaction.

In the follow-up four years later, they'd accurately predicted divorce 94 percent of the time.

"Faces are the primary signal system in humans, and some other animals as well, for emotions," Ekman said.

Listed as one of 100 "eminent psychologists of the 20th Century" by the American Psychological Association in 2002, Ekman has been studying the facial expression of emotion across cultures--from the United States and Japan to Papua New Guinea and Brazil--since the 1960s.

With colleague Wallace Friesen, he wrote the Facial Action Coding System, a technical guide to the movements of facial muscles and how some of those movements relate to specific emotions.

The work was published in 1978, updated in 2002, and has been used by researchers in the fields of psychology, psychiatry and neurology as well as by actors, animators and computer scientists.

Caroline Keating, an associate professor of psychology at Colgate University, has used Ekman's research on facial expressions to study how children identify emotions and to study deception in children and adults.

A key player

In relationships, facial expressions "play a crucial role" in telling us what our partner really wants. "Oftentimes we say we want an honest answer or opinion, when in fact what we're looking for is social support," Keating said.

"The [challenge] is to figure out exactly what that person is asking us for. Facial expressions are often the best clues we have to look underneath the meaning of words."

(Hint: Remember this the next time your partner asks, "Do you like my outfit?")

According to oft-cited research published in 1972, 7 percent of emotional meaning is delivered through words. Thirty-eight percent is conveyed by tone of voice.